What Is Wrong With Extreme Wealth

* Article: What, if Anything, is Wrong with Extreme Wealth? By Ingrid Robeyns. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. A Multi-Disciplinary Journal for People-Centered Development, Volume 20, 2019 - Issue 3 doi

URL = https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19452829.2019.1633734

Abstract:

"This paper proposes a view, called limitarianism, which suggests that there should be upper limits to the amount of income and wealth a person can hold. One argument for limitarianism is that superriches can undermine political equality. The other reason is that it would be better if the surplus money that superrich households have were to be used to meet unmet urgent needs and local and global collective action problems. A particular urgent case of the latter is climate change. The paper discusses one objection to limitarianism, and draws some conclusions for society, as well as for the human development paradigm and the capability approach."

Excerpt

"In political philosophy, the different possible views on the legitimate inequalities have been given labels.

• One view is called sufficientarianism, which holds that justice requires that everyone should meet a minimum amount of the things that distributive justice is concerned with, such as functionings and capabilities.

• Another view is prioritarianism, which holds that in choosing our actions and how we design social institutions, we should give priority to the worst off. In addition, there are various forms of equality of opportunity—the view that inequalities in outcomes can be justified, as long as we start from a level playing field, and everyone has equal opportunities.

• The final view is libertarianism, which states that asking questions about distributions is a fundamental mistake, since what matters are the rights that people have, and since those rights are inalienable. They are what Robert Nozick (1974) calls side-constraints on our actions: there is nothing a person or the state can do that violates those rights. Hence, asking questions about the right shape of the distribution of money or wealth or functionings or capabilities is asking the wrong question.

In answering the multidisciplinary question what, if anything, is wrong with a society in which some are very wealthy, I would like to propose a view in this literature on the pattern of distributive justice, called Economic Limitarianism (Robeyns 2017). In a nutshell, economic limitarianism holds the view that no one should hold surplus money, which is defined as the money one has over and above what one needs for a fully flourishing life. Limitarianism as an ethical or political view is, in a certain sense, symmetrical to the view that there is a poverty line and that no one should fall below this line. Limitarianism claims that one can theoretically construct a riches line and that a world in which no one would be above the riches line would be a better world."

(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19452829.2019.1633734)